e-flux presents True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films
The War Game
Peter Watkins
1966
46 Minutes
Date
April 6–19, 2021
Join us on e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1966), on view from Tuesday, April 6 through Monday, April 19, 2021.
Intended for broadcast on BBC in 1965, Peter Watkins’ nuclear war docudrama was withheld and remained untelevized for nearly twenty years. Continuing his previous experiments in blending fiction and documentary techniques, The War Game presents data drawn from Watkins’ detailed research—statistics extrapolated from nuclear bombings, quotes from high-ranking officials, Civil Defense documents, and scientific studies and accounts of the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts as well as the non-nuclear devastation of Dresden, Hamburg, and other cities during World War II. Since the 1960s, the film has become one of the most known examples of the faux documentary style, using actors and staged interviews to achieve realistic and shocking effects, and convey the political message that prompted BBC director general Hugh Carlton Greene to proclaim the film “too horrific for the medium of broadcast.” Ironically, the film went on to win the Oscar for best documentary feature after being released in theaters in 1966.
The War Game is presented here as one of four films in Part Five | Faux Documentary and Complex Reality the last of five programs in the online series True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films programmed by Lukas Brasiskis for e-flux Video & Film.
True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films runs from February 9 through April 19, 2021. The films in each part will screen for two weeks with a repeat screening of films in all programs on Tuesday, April 20, 2021.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
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